ABSTRACT
In September 2013 a new central public library was opened in Birmingham. The choice of name, the ‘Library of Birmingham’, denoted a desire to make a clean break with the powerful but (for some) distasteful and overbearing image of its predecessor, the Birmingham Central Library (BCL), opened in January 1974 (Figure 8.1).1 The new Library of Birmingham, it was claimed during its planning stage, would be ‘welcoming and inviting to all, not a barrier to participation as with the current [1974] design’.2 Enshrined in this statement, issued by the City of Birmingham Council in 2008, was the belief that over the forty years of its existence (it was eventually closed in the summer of 2013) the BCL building had made a ‘poor visual impact’, and that this, moreover, was closely linked to the
public feeling that the services provided within it were exclusive, lacking broad appeal.3 Paradoxically, similar things were said about the Victorian Birmingham Reference Library (see Figure 0.1) – outmoded and unfriendly to users, its exterior blackened by decades of city soot – in the years leading up to its replacement by the BCL.
